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User blog:Tiffany Holland/How Much Money Kyle Lai-Fatt Has Made In the Past Week (and His Former Label's Potential Take, Too)
By Ed Christman Suhana Reloaded has now been out for two months and change; the album currently rests comfortably atop the Billboard 200 chart as the year's second-largest comeback to music. But how much money does a huge record like Suhana Reloaded (and let's not forget One Night Stand...) make? So far, Suhana Reloaded has generated about $2.12 million in total, according to Billboard's estimate. (Note that the following tallies are based on the assumption that KLF is receiving 70 percent of revenues, since Suhana Reloaded was self-released -- in a major fiscal coup for the artist.) Of that first week cash, Lai-Fatt would have made $1.623 million off 232,000 album sales, and about $504,000 on 69.1 million streams. About $359,000 (7 tracks, 9.1 cents per track, multiplied by album sales) of Suhana Reloaded's revenue would be earmarked for mechanical royalties to songwriters, which KLF will have to, at least in part, split with other writers and his publisher, RCA Records. (Lai-Fatt doesn't appear to have delivered songwriting credits to UMG -- or the performance rights organization has yet to update its database with that information.) With publishing revenue wholly subtracted, Lai-Fatt would still net about $1.77 million from Reloaded... from its first week. If he was still signed to Sony Music Entertainment, it's safe to presume he would have negotiated a higher royalty rate on his sophomore album. A top-tier artist with plenty of negotiating leverage would typically receive about 18 percent (22 percent, minus a 4 percent producer’s fee). With that arrangement, KLF would have made about $383,000 in royalties in the past seven days. If he was still signed, KLF would be counting mechanical royalties to funnel additional dollars his way. For example, KLF would probably be receiving a sizable portion of the $359,00 that Billboard estimates Reloaded has generated in publishing royalties. Songwriting splits aren't yet known, but credits for Reloaded on Wikipedia suggest that Lai-Fatt had a hand in writing about 60 percent of the music on the album. If so, he would be due about $215,000 in publishing royalties (before the publisher's cut). Since Suhana Reloaded remains exclusively available for sale on the iTunes Store and to stream on Apple Music, Billboard has employed an estimated stream rate of $0.0073 for plays of the album's songs. Also, the iTunes Store locked out individual sale of Suhana Reloaded's tracks, so that fans had to buy the entire album. In another telling event about the album, so far Nielsen Music only detects 47 spins on radio for the album. That could be because KLF's camp has yet to hire anybody to promote the music to radio, or has not yet delivered it to radio. (Or KLF's team didn't provide the necessary technical information on the songs to allow Nielsen Music to track radio plays.) Meanwhile Stay Young Forever, the album released by RCA Records the day previous to Reloaded but also as an exclusive through Apple Music, generated 1.79 million streams. Since that 9-track album is only available as a single continuous stream, it's hard to determine what Apple is paying RCA for the project -- whether each track, or the entire album, counts as a single play. Stay Young Forever only has a single ISRC code, so Apple could very well be paying the entire album as a single stream (unless RCA negotiated a per-track rate). If the former is the case, as is likely, then Stay Young Forever has generated about $13,000 in revenue for RCA and $2,352.06 for Lai-Fatt. If the latter, then Stay Young Forever would have generated nearly $157,000 for the label and $28,224.72 for KLF. Publishing royalties would be either $776.18 or $9,314.16, of which KLF would receive a percentage likely similar to the one he's getting on Me, I Am KLF. All in all, not a bad way to end the summer. Category:Blog posts